In the mornings I sat at the kitchen table and typed what was intended to be my first novel on my Olivetti portable. The hero’s name, like that in Of Human Bondage, was Philip. I cannot remember what his last name was; it must have been vaguely Jewish, but not foreign. I wrote without flourish. Maugham and Fleet Street led me to keep things simple. Philip was and was not me. He went to a public school that I think I called Greyfriars and he was, like Maugham’s club-footed alter ego, lonely and misunderstood. My Philip’s lameness was that he was a Jew. I cannot recall precisely what happened to him or whether I got sufficiently far for him to be liberated from his solitude by love.
What did Beetle do while I clicked at my flimsy pages? A writer relies on the tact and patience of the woman he lives with. She promised me, when I handed her the morning’s work, that it was going well. At lunchtime, we had fried eggs, beans and sauté potatoes, and then we went to bed. We made love and we slept and then we walked to one of the two nearby beaches. The more convenient was Escalet, where there were rocks and other people. A blond Swede sunned himself naked on a tall rock under the burned-out villa that we dreamed of being rich enough to buy. We were too timid to take off our swimsuits at Escalet, but one day the Swede called down to us, quite as if we were naked, ‘Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve!’
We had to walk an extra three or four kilometres to reach the long, empty, sun-blanched beach at Pampelonne, where – seven years before – the Americans had landed in strength on their way to Berlin. There we could swim naked in an empty sea and lie on the deserted sand, under a gleam of Ambre Solaire, and read our Penguin Anna Karenina and The Charterhouse of Parma. Oh, to be a modern Fabrizio del Dongo! One afternoon, a party of French people came onto the beach several hundred metres from us. I was British enough immediately to pull on my swimming trunks. ‘Bougez pas!’ one of them called. ‘Nous sommes aussi des naturistes!’ A decade later, Pampelonne became the first nudist beach on the Côte d’Azur. Sex-starved Anglo-Saxons came to get their first plein air sight of brazen breasts.
On the road back to Ramatuelle, we knew we were halfway when we passed the shuttered pink house that I called ‘Eyeless in Gaza’, thinking more of Aldous Huxley than of John Milton. My thickening beard was partly in homage to Mr Gumbril in Antic Hay. The days passed, and the nights. We could not afford to go out to a meal, although the village artist recommended the Auberge de l’Ancre, a kilometre along the road through the olive orchards. It was worth a visit if we wanted something ‘un tout petit peu différent’. The implication seemed to be that the company was louche, perhaps orgiastic. We did walk out to have a look at the place one evening. I stopped and pissed by the roadside, like a Frenchman. Beetle had never seen anyone do that before.
I even bought a beret. I had no idea that such headgear had been a distinguishing mark of the Vichy Milice. Our conviviality was limited to an occasional coffee under the wide vine of the café in the square. One evening, a party of English smarties, who had parked their open Ford Consul by the communal fountain, asked us where we were staying. I said, ‘Here.’ One of them said, ‘What do you find to do?’
We hardly spoke to anyone else during our weeks in Ramatuelle. The exception was a soignée Swiss woman, in her later twenties, who was also staying chez Madame Isnard. Isabelle had unblemished red fingernails and dressed to go nowhere as if it were a very chic destination. She was pleased to tell us that she was a speakerine on Télévision Suisse Romande. She had come to Ramatuelle to get away from publicity. She was in retreat in order to decide whether or not to marry a rich older man. Nothing seemed more grotesque than making a decision about, as we presumed, whether you loved someone or not.
Jean-Baptiste, the village Cézanne, who invited us to see his nice paintings of fruit and flowers, called our Swiss neighbour ‘Isabeau’. Knowing little French history, I took this to be his own sarcastic invention. La Suissesse left after a few days without disclosing her decision. Two years later, I wrote a short story entitled ‘The Lacquer Set’ featuring Isabeau and her immaculate fingernails. It was accepted for publication by Peter Green, who had been appointed editor of a compendium which was to be called The Book of the Year. The publisher went broke before my story could appear. Peter and I have remained close, if often literally distant, friends ever since.
Beetle and I decided to do the romantic thing and have a midnight swim under the new moon. We walked the silvered road to Pampelonne and turned down through the vineyards, unseen dogs barking, to the long beach. We hesitated and then plunged in, and out, and ran towards our towels and then preferred each other and made love on the shining shingle. When we had finished, our wet skins were badged with the ocean’s small change. I may have quoted Ezra Pound’s line about ‘fish-scale roofs’. The excursion was unforgettable; but we did not feel the vocation to repeat it. On the Quatorze Juillet, we danced in the village square and Beetle cried and when I asked her why she said, ‘Because I’m so happy.’ As our tally of days dwindled into single figures, I realised that I would never complete the sad complement of Philip’s schooldays nor achieve his Lawrencian liberation from woeful chastity. With less than a week left, I had accumulated a hundred and some pages, but I was too conscious of their gaucheries to believe that I should ever return to them.
Then I remembered that Noël Coward claimed to have written Hay Fever in three days. If he could do it, so could I. My play was called With This Ring and the main character was called Tynan, a tribute, no doubt, to the precocious Ken, who was already the tyrant of Shaftesbury Avenue. Mr Maugham was right; if you had a facility for dialogue, you needed only to take dictation from the voices in your head. When we boarded the sad train back to Paris, I had the eighty and some pages of a finished play in my luggage.
We stayed our last sad, happy nights together at the Hôtel des Etats Unis on the Boulevard Montparnasse. I hunted adjacent shops for a present nice enough to sweeten the lies I was going to tell my parents about the weeks I had spent, somewhere or other, conning Virgil with John Patrick Sullivan. On our last evening, I persuaded Beetle to come to Le Jockey, a nightclub where there were girls with naked breasts. She did not seem to enjoy it all that much.
To arrive back in England was a return to childhood. I was spineless enough to be less distressed by separation from Beetle than nervous of being discovered to have been happy. I meant my black beard to be the bristling announcement to Manor Fields that I was now a grown-up writer. I gave my parents a nice glazed dish with a green bird in the middle that I told them came from the Boulevard Montparnasse where John and I had stayed. They asked few questions about where else we had been. It would be nice to suppose that it pleased them to think of me having a good time.
Before my beard was removed, as my parents insisted, Jack Piesse wanted to come and see it. Bronzed from the English summer sun, he asked me to open my shirt so that we could compare the depth of our tans. He laughed and, more with a gesture than any actual physical contact, seemed to embrace me. The scene remains in my mind like the prelude to something that never, in fact, happened. I had a sense, nothing more, that he would not have been as effusive, in a manly way, if Margaret had been there. Since my beard grew in thick curls under my jaw and was quite prickly, I was not very sorry to be shorn. A petty Samson, not eyeless, in Putney not Gaza, I was deprived of my badge of virile independence. At the same time, I was glad enough of my success in avoiding detection to resume life in Balliol House with furtive relief.
VII
THERE WAS TIME, before the autumn term, to take my new play to a meeting of the Alumni Dramatic Society. Thanks to the enthusiasm of Jackie Weiss, the company agreed to stage With This Ring before I went back up to Cambridge in early October. I was confident enough, among Jews, both to direct the play and to take the leading role. I also supplied the paintings (one of the pink house we had called Eyeless in Gaza, others of Ramatuelle) with which we decked the set. It was easier, and more enjoyable, to be the first man in St John’s Wood than the umpteenth in Cambridge
. Synagogue members and friends came to the play in generous numbers and laughed at my jokes. The plot of the piece escapes the lucky dip of memory. I do recall one line, in which someone said, ‘He chased her all through the Olympic games and she fell at the last hurdle’ and another, concerning a divorce case, in which the plaintiff was proud to announce, ‘The judge said he’d never been so shocked.’
I never imagined that any critic would trek to Westbourne Grove for an amateur production, but With This Ring received a half-column review in The Stage. It congratulated the author on his wit and on his energetic direction, but remarked that he had ‘walked backwards’ on stage. How was I to know that there was anything anomalous in such a move? When the play’s brief run was over, I packed my trunk to go back to Cambridge. Beetle found a job as secretary to a freelance journalist, Leonard Rule, who lived near Abbey Road and was sure that the future of mankind depended on nuclear energy. He paid her £8 a week. Her duties included walking his dog in Abbey Road.
My scholar’s privileges no longer secured me rooms in college. I was allotted ‘licensed digs’, complete with chapel-going landlords, not far away, behind the Round Church and the Union, in Park Street. The Amateur Dramatic Club had its exclusive premises further down the same street. Tony Becher and John Sullivan had also been evicted from college, but Tony was immediately at odds with the landlord of the digs to which he had been assigned. His report of their altercation concluded:
Landlord: ‘I’ll tell yer chutor.’
Tony: ‘I’m going to see him myself.’
Landlord: ‘I’ll be there before ya.’
The matter was resolved by Tony being offered a double set of spare rooms in college. Asked with whom he would like to share, he chose Sullivan. That evening, I went into Hall and sat deliberately alone, several places from where Joe Bain and Pat Hutton (a handsome, always smiling Old Wykehamist) and other ‘arties’ were grouped. Sensing that they were talking about me, I assumed that they were rejoicing in my ostracism by Becher and Sullivan. Carthusian experience has always disposed me to believe that I may at any moment be deemed a pariah. Suddenly, with a concert of cutlery, the company shifted down the long table towards me.
Chris Stephens said, ‘You’ve written a play, do we gather?’
I said, ‘How the hell do you know that?’
My despicable fear was that someone had discovered, and would spread the word, that With This Ring had been staged by a group from the Liberal Jewish synagogue.
‘It was reviewed, wasn’t it? In The Stage. Not bad. At all.’
I found myself all at once an accredited member of what its members called ‘the Gaiety’. There was no overt homosexual implication. The Gaiety’s camp style distinguished it from the Hearties, who regarded theatricals as effete, if not necessarily ‘like that’. A founder member, who had gone down by the time I took my place in the company, had been notoriously and unashamedly queer. Joe Bain told of how Mike H. had picked up a paratrooper in The Baron of Beef one evening and came to collect his porridge the following morning twirling a crimson beret on one upraised finger.
In our day, H’s outrageousness was echoed only by John Hargreaves, a tall, blanched, Yorkshireman. His long, square-shouldered black overcoat might have been seconded from some undertaker’s wardrobe. It gave him the funereal allure of a corvine priest. His terse loquaciousness presaged the reproduction Yorkshire of Alan Bennett. In our first year, Hargreaves’s air of mordant difference made him the target of derision from the louder members of the Lady Margaret Boat Club. Some of them, in a translated Oxonian spirit, threatened to debag him and dump him in the Cam.
At the outset of our second year, Hargreaves pinned a pronunciamento on the Junior Combination Room noticeboard. Headed ‘To Whom It May Concern’, it declared that, having been menaced with physical assault by a posse of the less savoury members of the college, Mr John Hargreaves had taken the precaution of arming himself with a swordstick. Should anyone lay so much as one finger on him, he would not hesitate to run him through. Hargreaves was a performance artist who never appeared on any Cambridge stage. Wherever he happened to be was his theatre. His catchphrase, uttered with exaggerated tykishness, was ‘very beautiful and very sad’. Whether he was practically gay, who knows? Another of his favourite sayings was, ‘The jewels I lavished on that boy!’ I never saw him after he had left St John’s. One rumour has it that he later became the deputy chief constable of Yorkshire; another that he contracted leprosy and literally fell to pieces.
Joe Bain, who was now sporting a gold-topped stick, needed no sword to enforce his modest superiority. Having come up for a fourth year, he was studying for a ‘Dip. Ed.’ (Diploma of Education) before embarking on a teaching career, first at Stowe, then as sixth-form master at Winchester. Unlike Tony Becher, Joe preferred arcane obscenities. The most memorable was of the Frenchwoman (it might have been Colette’s Léah) who said to her young lover ‘Doucement, doucement’ and then – with a tolerant sigh – ‘Trop tard!’ The little phrase proved useful many years later: it supplied a succinct summary of the action in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach when I came to write an essay about a novelette on which Karl Miller, among other pundits, had lavished contestable superlatives.
In 1950s Cambridge, love and marriage were said, by both Frank Sinatra and Frank Leavis, in their different ways, to go together like a horse and carriage. There was fierce competition (from which I was happily exempt) for female favours, however rationed. The Lady Margaret Players held occasional readings to which females were invited. The most welcome was the beautiful Joan Rowlands, who was soon linked, somewhat permanently, with Michael Bakewell. On one occasion, organised by Harold Cannon, there was a shortage of texts of whatever Ben Jonson piece had been selected. Some resourceful performer equipped himself with a folio edition from the college library. Cued to enunciate a line that, in his antique text with its tall ‘s’ was easy to misread, he pronounced it ‘wind-fucker’. Harold Cannon, a solid person, glanced in shame at Joan and said, ‘SUCK ’er, you fool.’
Soon after my enrolment as an accredited member of the Gaiety, Donald Rudd, who had printed my poem in the Young Writers’ Group magazine, asked me to enter my play for the competition its new editor, Peter Firth, was running. The prize was a week’s run on the ADC stage. Rudd told me, in an excess of candour, that Peter would be grateful if I submitted With This Ring, because there had been so few entries. I had no doubt that a comedy about a suburban romance, in which a girl not wholly unlike Hilary Phillips was the put-upon bride, would never win prizes in the Cambridge theatre commanded, not to say commandeered, by Peter Wood and Peter Hall. If genius is certified by taking infinite pains, Hall showed early signs of it. When directing As You Like It, he took care to insist that any male actor costumed in tight breeches should wear a jockstrap. Folklore promises that a voice from the back called out, ‘Does that include those with small parts?’
After Donald Rudd reported my reluctance to be an also-ran, Peter Firth sought me out to say that, if I delivered my play to what he conceded might well be a gentle execution, he would make sure that something appreciative was said about it in Varsity. I am surprised, looking back, that I had a copy of With This Ring in my narrow Park Street digs, but I gave it to Firth, with no hope of preferment. As a result, those three days in Ramatuelle during which I wrote my first play turned out to be cardinal in my life.
When the winner was announced, it was Hugh Thomas. His play, Some Talk of Angels, was precociously calculated to procure the prize. A fantasy in the style of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning, it was set in a modern, still independent Venice, quite as if Ludovico Manin had never thrown his ring into the Adriatic and surrendered his city to Napoleon. Since Some Talk of Angels took place soon before the Second World War, there was opportunity for farcical portrayals of strutting Fascists and supercilious Nazis without any need for references to their later, less laughable activities. In the first years of the 1950s, Cambridge was a repêchage
of the bon vieux temps in which foreigners were comic and Britain retained dominion over palm and pine (the University Appointments Board was still on the lookout for likely district officers).
We continued to live in the era of ration books, utility furniture and national indebtedness. The return of Winston Churchill to 10 Downing Street, in 1951, primed the illusion that the old gentleman (whom the left denounced as a ‘war-monger’) could restore Britain to what it was when Evelyn Waugh first visited Brideshead. Hugh Thomas’s Waugh-like penchant for grandiloquence was symptomatic of the nostalgia that seldom dared to speak its full name. In the bipartisan spirit known as Butskellism, the ascendant Hugh Thomas reconciled patrician tones with socialist affiliation. As President of the Union, he became acquainted with Hugh Gaitskell, the new leader of the Labour Party.
In 1956, after resigning from the Foreign Office in protest at Eden’s Suez adventure, Hugh was given an inside track to stand as the unsuccessful Labour Party candidate for Ruislip. He was then alerted, by James MacGibbon, to the fact that a reliable history of the Spanish Civil War had yet to be written. His pioneering, nicely balanced account was published in 1961 and has been revised several times since. In recent years, while remaining a Hispanic pundit, he has swung as far to the right as an ermined pendulum well can.
Peter Firth suggested that I audition for the part of the American ambassador to the Serene Republic. In Yankee guise, I was not in the least nervous. My Carthusian accent might as well have been an affectation and American my natural style. I wrung enough laughs from the selectors, feet up in the stalls, to imagine that my New York self was a shoo-in for the part. They thanked me and promised that they would ‘let me know’.
A few days later, I was approached in Park Street, as I left my pinched digs, by the tall Toby Robertson, one of the auditioning panel. It was a sunny afternoon in early November. He said, ‘Oh, Raphael … I was, um, meaning to get in touch with you.’
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